Trump’s 2020 plan offers broadly popular — but quite limited — pro-American restrictions on migration and visa workers. In many speeches, for example, Trump ignores the economic impact of blue-collar and white-collar migration on Americans while stressing issues of crime, outsiders, diseases, or welfare, even though his low-immigration policies have been a popular boon to Americans.
Joe Biden’s 2020 plan promises to let companies import more visa workers, to let mayors import temporary workers, to accelerate the inflow of chain migration migrants, to end migration enforcement against illegal aliens unless they commit a felony, and to dramatically accelerate the inflow of poor refugees to at least 125,000 per year.
Open-ended legal migration is praised by business and progressives partly because migrants’ arrival helps to transfer wealth from wage-earners to stockholders.
Migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the central states to the coastal states.
Migration also allows investors and CEOs to skimp on labor-saving technology, sideline U.S. minorities, ignore disabled people, exploit stoop labor in the fields, short-change labor in the cities, impose tight control on American professionals, centralize technological innovation, undermine labor rights, and get many left-wing reporters to cheerlead for Wall Street’s priorities.
So Trump's economy grew and wages rose amid a decline in migration.
Inconceivable! … responds the chorus from the Chamber, Cato, the Koch's network, Brookings, Silicon Valley, Wall St. WashPo, NYT, etc. https://t.co/I0I1Lhs0v0
Millions of Americans Projected to Remain Jobless as Biden Packs U.S. Labor Force with Foreign Workers
Millions of Americans are projected to remain jobless for the next three to four years, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), though President Joe Biden is looking to fill American jobs with foreign workers.
In a report released this month, CBO analysts said the number of jobless Americans — all of whom want full-time jobs — will not return to pre-coronavirus levels until around 2024.
“As the economy expands, many people rejoin the civilian labor force who had left it during the pandemic, restoring it to its pre-pandemic size in 2022,” the CBO report states. “The unemployment rate gradually declines throughout the period, and the number of people employed returns to its pre-pandemic level in 2024.”
The CBO analysis projects that while the unemployment rate, which hides the number of total Americans out of the workforce, will return to an average of about four percent between 2024 and 2025. Biden, himself, admitted on camera that the U.S. would not be at “full employment” until 2031.
“That’s not hyperbole. That’s a fact,” Biden said.
President Biden on new jobs numbers: “At that rate it’s gonna take 10 years before we get to full employment. That's not hyperbole. That's a fact." pic.twitter.com/nlFGZ1JOEs
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) February 5, 2021
Before then, millions of Americans are projected to remain jobless though that has not kept the Biden administration from pursuing a labor policy that floods the United States labor market with millions of illegal aliens, foreign visa workers, and green card-holders.
At the U.S.-Mexico border, Biden has restarted the Catch and Release program, which frees border crossers and illegal aliens into the interior of the country while they await their asylum hearings. Previously, a series of cooperative agreements with Central America and the Remain in Mexico policy had effectively ended Catch and Release, drastically cutting asylum fraud.
Many of those border crossers and illegal aliens will hunt for mostly blue-collar American jobs that otherwise would go to Americans.
Similarly, Biden has suggested he will surge refugee resettlement to the U.S. by 2022, seek an amnesty for nearly all illegal aliens, and block reforms to various visa programs while seeking an increase in legal immigration levels.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which helps protect the U.S. labor market by enforcing federal immigration law, has been crippled by Biden’s orders that attempt to halt deportations and only prioritize the arrest of illegal aliens who are terrorists, national security threats, or convicted aggravated felons.
The initiatives are being cheered by Wall Street, Big Tech, and corporate interests who can boost profit margins by cutting the cost of U.S. labor via a flooded labor market.
Today, there are more than 17 million jobless Americans and another six million who are underemployed. All want full-time jobs with competitive wages and good benefits.
Every year, about 1.2 million legal immigrants are awarded green cards to permanently resettle in the U.S. and eventually apply for citizenship. In addition, another 1.4 million visas are given out annually to foreign nationals to take U.S. jobs, while 11 to 22 million illegal aliens currently live in the country.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com.
Tom Cotton: Joe Biden Avoids Wage-Raise Policy
NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images
23 Oct 2020154
3:42
Joe Biden’s open-borders migration policy ignores the obvious way for the government to help Americans get wage raises, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., told SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.
“The simple way to help workers to get pay raises is to mandate the use of the E-Verify system,” Cotton said in the October 23 interview, adding:
You’re not going to impose a wage mandate on anyone. You just have to tell every company in this nation that they will use the E-Verify system to verify the legal eligibility for applicant employees to work. That will automatically help raise wages for American workers, not for illegal aliens.
The E-Verify system allows hiring companies to quickly and easily verify job applicants’ legality, at no cost to the employer.
But instead of raising wages by the use of E-verify, Biden is promising to flood Americans’ labor market by legalizing the nation’s semi-hidden population of illegal immigrant workers, Cotton said.:
Joe Biden is saying, “I’m gonna send an amnesty bill to the Congress in my first hundred days without asking anything in return, without trying to secure our border, without enforcing immigration rules at workplaces against unscrupulous employers, without cracking down on visa fraud.”
Biden is also threatening to import additional white-collar and blue-collar workers, Cotton said:
He’s also talking about importing millions and millions of new workers, over and above the 15 million illegal aliens here who are going to get amnesty, and therefore the right to work. He is going to import millions of workers at a time when we have more than 10 million Americans who are still out of work because of the Wuhan coronavirus. So Joe Biden is going to bring in millions of new foreigners to compete with those Americans who are out of work at a time when we should be putting American workers first in line for American jobs. It just goes to show how radicalized the Democrats have become on immigration.
Trump’s 2020 plan offers broadly popular — but quite limited — pro-American restrictions on migration and visa workers. In many speeches, for example, Trump ignores the economic impact of blue-collar and white-collar migration on Americans while stressing issues of crime, outsiders, diseases, or welfare, even though his low-immigration policies have been a popular boon to Americans.
Joe Biden’s 2020 plan promises to let companies import more visa workers, to let mayors import temporary workers, to accelerate the inflow of chain migration migrants, to end migration enforcement against illegal aliens unless they commit a felony, and to dramatically accelerate the inflow of poor refugees to at least 125,000 per year.
Open-ended legal migration is praised by business and progressives partly because migrants’ arrival helps to transfer wealth from wage-earners to stockholders.
Migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the central states to the coastal states.
Migration also allows investors and CEOs to skimp on labor-saving technology, sideline U.S. minorities, ignore disabled people, exploit stoop labor in the fields, short-change labor in the cities, impose tight control on American professionals, centralize technological innovation, undermine labor rights, and get many left-wing reporters to cheerlead for Wall Street’s priorities.
So Trump's economy grew and wages rose amid a decline in migration.
Inconceivable! … responds the chorus from the Chamber, Cato, the Koch's network, Brookings, Silicon Valley, Wall St. WashPo, NYT, etc. https://t.co/I0I1Lhs0v0
— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) October 23, 2020
TO BUY THE INVADERS' ILLEGAL VOTES, THE GLOBALIST DEMOCRAT PARTY MUST PROMISE THEM OUR JOBS, MORE WELFARE AND AMNESTY SO THEY MAY LEGALLY BRING UP THE REST OF MEXICO AND VOTED DEM FOR MORE
Democratic nominee Joe Biden and Republican President Donald Trump barely mention the hardship facing millions, while both promise Wall Street that they’ll continue to pursue the deadly reopening of schools and businesses as part of the ruling class’s genocidal “herd immunity” policy, which has been embraced from Trump and Biden to the Democratic Socialists of America, demonstrating their shared class interests.
Catastrophic job losses continue in the US as nearly 800,000 new unemployment claims reported
a day ago
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Over the last 31 weeks, 65.2 million initial unemployment claims have been filed, including 787,000 for the week ending Oct. 17, a slight decrease from the 842,000 filed the previous week, but still over 85,000 more than the previous high set in 1982.
The astronomical total is nearly 30 million higher than what was filed throughout the entire 2008–09 Great Recession. The economic crisis which has ravaged the working class and small businesses since March is the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
People wait for a distribution of food in the Harlem neighborhood of New York, April 18, 2020 (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, File)
Nearly 11 million jobs have yet to be restored over seven months into the pandemic as “temporary cut-backs” become permanent, especially among restaurants, salons, nightclubs and bars that have depleted Paycheck Protection Program loans, yet have not seen a recovery in revenue as the coronavirus continues to spread unchecked throughout the US.
According to an ongoing study by Opportunity Insights, which compiles public and private data, nearly a quarter of small businesses, 24.1 percent, have closed since January, while overall small business revenue is down 23.2 percent in the last nine months.
Illustrating persistent economic stagnation, the October federal jobs report, which is based on September statistics, showed that 2.4 million workers have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more, up 800,000 from 1.6 million in the month of August.
The top five states with the most new claims were California, with 158,877; followed by New York with 56,483; Texas, 50,819; Illinois, 47,018; and finally, Massachusetts with 44,518 jobless claims. California had not reported numbers the last two weeks in order to implement a new “anti-fraud” program to catch alleged scammers.
In addition to the nearly 800,000 initial claims, another 345,440 people applied for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, which was passed as part of the CARES Act in March, bringing the total number of claims for unemployment support above 1.1 million. There has yet to be a single week since March 14 in which combined state and PUA claims have not exceeded 1 million.
Part of the reason for the decline in the number of continuing claims for unemployment benefit, which are administered through the individual states as opposed to the federal government, is that a majority of states have capped at 26 weeks the length of time jobless workers can collect benefits, while some, such as Florida and North Carolina, set the maximum at only 13 weeks. Just under 9 million people are currently collecting state benefits.
As those benefits begin to expire, workers who were laid off at the start of the pandemic have begun to shift to the federal Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) program. The PEUC program, which provides an additional 13 weeks of benefits and expires on Dec. 31, added 509,823 people for the week ending Oct. 3, bringing that total to 3.3 million.
While this has led to a reduction in the actual number of people collecting government assistance, this does not mean the need has evaporated. All together some 23.2 million people are on some form of unemployment insurance. The four-week average for new claims, after revisions, is at 811,000, roughly four times the pre-pandemic average.
For thousands of workers the daily ritual of navigating phone trees, filing claims and waiting on hold in order to maybe speak to a human and file the necessary paperwork in order to collect some form of assistance has yet to bear fruit. In Nevada, which only began paying out the $300-a-week Lost Wage Assistance (LWA) benefit last week, nearly 18,000 jobless workers have organized in a private Facebook Group to assist others in navigating the labyrinthine process.
“I haven’t gotten thru in WEEKS… I’m losing my patience you guys. This is soo illegal and unfair,” reads a recent comment, typical of the experience for thousands of workers. Others state that they have been calling for 27 weeks, or more, only to be hung up on as they try to negotiate archaic unemployment systems which in many cases, have been specifically designed to frustrate and impede.
Another wrote, “So I called the [unemployment] number 3 times today. One call said ‘thanks for calling behavioral health.’ The second call said ‘you’ve reached the United registry,’ and the 3rd call said ‘please enter your social security number.’”
While thousands continue to try and process their claims, for millions of other workers in states across the country the LWA funds have already dried up. As of this week only New Jersey, Nevada, Hawaii, Wisconsin, Virginia, Alaska, Kansas and Arkansas are still paying out LWA.
The dire situation facing millions of workers has yet to compel both capitalist parties into coming to terms on another relief bill. On Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, once again, held limited talks that didn’t yield any legislation, much less an agreement.
“It is not just a question of us agreeing in a room… it takes time,” Pelosi said.
While Pelosi, married to a real estate investor worth an estimated $114 million, and Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs banker worth an estimated $300 million, take their time, US census data indicates that nearly 51 million households are unable to budget for basic monthly expenses, while 1 in 4 households have experienced food insecurity this year.
The need has gotten so extreme for millions of people in the richest country in the world that popular internet crowd-funding website GoFundMe.com debuted a “Basic Necessities Cause Fund,” which will “offer financial relief for basic needs such as rent and food.” The website notes that since March 2020, donor support on GoFundMe has increased, “300% for fundraisers related to rent, food, and bills.”
Meanwhile, the Pentagon announced on Wednesday that the classified military intelligence budget was approved by Congress at the level of $23.1 billion for the fiscal year. In a brief statement, the Department of Defense stated that it wouldn’t release any “budget figures or program details … as they remain classified for national security reasons.”
It is the highest amount the military intelligence budget has received since Congress approved $27 billion in 2010. The Pentagon has requested another $23 billion for 2021.
At every step of the way the needs of the broad mass of the population, for food, housing and safety from the deadliest pandemic in a century are constantly thwarted by a parasitic ruling class, whose primary concern is increasing and preserving their ill-gotten wealth.
Democratic nominee Joe Biden and Republican
President Donald Trump barely mention the
hardship facing millions, while both promise Wall
Street that they’ll continue to pursue the deadly
reopening of schools and businesses as part of the
ruling class’s genocidal “herd immunity” policy,
which has been embraced from Trump and Biden to
the Democratic Socialists of America,
demonstrating their shared class interests.
Joe Biden Promises Welcome for Venezuelan, Cuban Migrants
ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP via Getty Images
Democratic candidate Joe Biden is offering a green light to migrants who want to flee from Cuba and Venezuela.
“The Venezuelan people need our support to recover their democracy and rebuild their country,” Biden told a political event in Florida on October 7. “That’s why I would immediately grant Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to Venezuelans” in the United States, he said.
The TPS status allows foreigners to live and work in the United States, and to get welfare and access to K-12 schools. Since 2017, President Donald Trump has blocked TPS for Venezuelans, amid campaigns by Florida business groups and D.C.-based progressives. Trump has also worked to shrink TPS populations created by prior presidents.
Biden continued:
There are almost 10,000 Cubans languishing in tent camps along the Mexican border because of the administration’s anti-immigration agenda. That’s the administration actively separating Cuban families by not processing visas [and] through restrictions on family visits and remittances. I think we have to reverse that.
If implemented, Biden’s welcome policy “will set off a new exodus from those countries as people try to take advantage of the opportunity to stay in the United States,” said Jessica Vaughan, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies.
Biden’s plan would hurt Americans, she said. “What scholars found specifically when they looked at the [1980] impact of Cubans in South Florida is that the wages of American workers who were competing for unskilled or less skilled jobs went down significantly … The usual suspects will benefit — the employers who will have a labor surplus and will get away with paying low wages, [and] the slumlords who can fill up their substandard affordable housing.”
The impact of low wages and surplus labor on Floridians was sketched in a June 2020 article in the Washington Post:
KISSIMMEE, FLA. — The pandemic had forced them from their home. Then they had run out of money for a motel. That left the car, which is where Sergine Lucien, Dave Marecheau and their two children were one recent night, parked in a lot that was tucked behind a row of empty storefronts.
Even when the economy was booming, Dave and Sergine had lived in a state of near homelessness, shuttling between seedy motels that had become a shelter of last resort for thousands in the Orlando area. Last year, after six years of the motel life, they had saved enough to finally make it out. They bought an RV and rented a spot in a quiet and clean mobile home community. Sergine promised the kids they would never go back.
Now all that was gone. In theory, they qualified for a $3,400 federal stimulus check, but they had no bank account or address to collect it. In theory, Dave was entitled to unemployment, but as of May only about 43 percent of the state’s 1.1 million claims had been paid.
“I would immediately grant temporary protected status to Venezuelans as President." ���
— @JoeBiden������ pic.twitter.com/4vGTctYTLX
— Fernand R. Amandi (@AmandiOnAir) October 7, 2020
“We have to be extremely prudent in offering any kind of temporary humanitarian protection,” Vaughan told Breitbart News.
Politicians ignore the emotional incentive for migrants to get into the United States, Vaughan said. “For the privileged, it might be a dollars-and-cents calculation. But for others, it’s more than that — it’s an opportunity to live freely with the opportunity to have a decent quality of life [and] to put their children on a trajectory towards prosperity.”
TPS migrants are rewarded for being in the United States, she said. “They are allowed to immediately access welfare programs, as happened with the Cubans [in 1980 and 1994] and Haitians [in 2010] — unlike other asylum seekers or green card admission – at an enormous cost.”
Even apparently small changes in border rules can precipitate floods of migrants, she said. The Central American migration began as “a trickle at first [in 2010], and quickly turned into a flood because the smuggler started to take advantage and fed this idea of coming here with kids, or sending your kids.”
The Central American migration was largely stopped in 2020 — but only because President Donald Trump and his deputies fought numerous high-profile battles with the agencies, various pro-migration groups, the establishment media, and many judges to impose a set of migration curbs.
Trump’s 2020 plan offers broadly popular restrictions on immigration and visa workers.
But Biden’s 2020 plan promises to let companies import more visa workers, to let mayors import temporary workers, to accelerate the inflow of chain-migration migrants, to suspend immigration enforcement against illegal aliens, and to dramatically increase the inflow of poor refugees.
“The number of [foreign] people who could potentially benefit [from Biden’s welcome] is limited only by the tolerance of our government,” Vaughan said. But Biden had his progressive supporters “live insulated from the effects of it, whether it is their schools, their job markets, or their neighborhoods … they live in a bubble.”
Biden’s allies “disregard the effects of their actions on regular Americans, which means it’s selfish elitism.” Like the characters in the 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, she said, “they use working people for their own sexual and emotional gratification and cast them aside, caring nothing for the effects on people’s lives.”
Opposition to refugees is bigotry, sneers WashPo columnist.
If @crampell stepped outside the country club, she'd see cheap labor hurts Americans' income, society, productivity & competitiveness.
But snobs praise diversity to reject solidarity w/ citizens.https://t.co/WdcYgwNU0R
— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) October 7, 2
Study finds 90 percent of Americans would make 67 percent more without last four decades of increasing income inequality
25 September 2020
A new study from the RAND Corporation, “Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018,” written by Carter Price and Kathryn Edwards, provides new documentation of the profound restructuring of class relations in America over the last 40 years.
The study, which looks at changes in pre-tax family income from 1947 to 2018, divided into quintiles of the American population, concludes that the bottom 90 percent of the population would, on average, make 67 percent more in income—every year (!)—had shifts in income inequality not occurred the last four decades.
In other words, any family that made less than $184,292 (the 90th percentile income bracket) in 2018 would be, on average, making 67 percent more. This amounts to a total sum of $2.5 trillion of collective lost income for the bottom 90 percent, just in 2018.
Furthermore, the study concludes, that had more equitable growth continued after 1975 (a date they use as a shifting point), the bottom 90 percent of American households would have earned a total of $47 trillion more in income.
Given that there were about 115 million households in the bottom 90 percent of the US in 2018 population (out of a total of 127.59 million in 2018), that would mean that each of these households would, on average, be $408,696 richer today with this lost income.
To reach these conclusions, the authors break down historical real, pre-tax, income into different quintiles of the population (bottom fifth, second fifth, third fifth, fourth fifth, highest fifth). Looking at the period between 1947 and 2018, they divide the years based on business cycles (booms and busts of the economy).
Growth in Annualized Real Family Pre-tax, Pre-Transfer Income by Quantile from RAND, “Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018,” by C. Price and K. Edwards.
Their data quantitatively expresses the restructuring of class relations that began at the end of the post-WWII boom. Facing intensified economic crisis, automation, and global competition, the US ruling class undertook an aggressive campaign of deindustrialization, slashing wages and clawing back benefits won in the previous period by explosive struggles of the working class, while simultaneously funneling money to financial markets, expanding the wealth and income of both the upper and upper-middle class.
As the data shows, while the bottom 40 percent of American households made significant percentile increases to their income, relative to the top 5 percent, for the 20 years between 1947 and 1968, in the 40 years from 1980 to the present, this trend was reversed. In 1980-2000, the bottom 40 percent of the population experienced a net income gain significantly below that of the top 5 percent. It must be noted that because these are percentile increases, the absolute differences between the gains of the rich versus the poor is far larger.
Furthermore, not included in this data is wealth. In the last 40 years, and especially the last 10 to 20 years, the stock market has become the principal means through which the top 10 percent of the population has piled up historic levels of wealth.
Significantly, the data from 2001 to 2018 shows a sharp slowdown in income gains for all sections of American society as per capita GDP growth slowed and US capitalism experienced a historic decline. However, while the income of the top 5 percent of the population may have only grown by about 2 percent between 2008 and 2018, the wealth of the top percentiles of the population exploded. For example, according to data from the Federal Reserve of St. Louis, the wealth of the top 1 percent of the population increased from almost $20 trillion in the first quarter of 2008, just before the worst of the financial crisis, to almost $33 trillion at the beginning of 2018.
By using the data, the authors come up with a set of counterfactual incomes based on what would be the different income brackets in 2018 without a shift in income distribution. The top 1 percent, instead of making on average $1,384,000 would make $630,000. The 25th percentile, instead of making $33,000 would make $61,000.
Data source: RAND; Graphics by Marry Traverse for Civic Ventures; as published in TIME Magazine
The authors of the study also make several other important observations by breaking down their data on the basis of location, education, and race.
Over 40 percent of mothers with children ages 12 and under are now food insecure in the US
Kevin Reed
7 May 2020
A blog post on the website of The Hamilton Project has revealed that hunger in the US has expanded to historically unprecedented proportions since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially among households with young children.
Reporting on evidence from two surveys, The Hamilton Project shows that by the end of April 2020, more than 20 percent of all US households and over 40 percent of mothers with children under the age of 13 were experiencing food insecurity. These figures are between two and five times greater than they were in 2018, when food insecurity data was last collected.
Households and children in the surveys are considered food insecure if a respondent “indicates the following statements were often or sometime true”:
· The food we bought just didn’t last and we didn’t have enough money to get more.
· The children in my household were not eating enough because we just couldn’t afford enough food.
Lauren Bauer, a fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution who specializes in social and safety net policies, wrote in her blog post on Wednesday, “Rates of food insecurity observed in April 2020 are also meaningfully higher than at any point for which there is comparable data” from 2001 to 2018.
A woman clutches a child while waiting with hundreds of people line up for food donations, given to those impacted by the COVID-19 virus outbreak, in Chelsea, Mass., Tuesday, April 28, 2020. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)
Further placing the present ability of families to put food on the table in historical context, Bauer writes, “Looking over time, particularly to the relatively small increase in child food insecurity during the Great Recession, it is clear that young children are experiencing food insecurity to an extent unprecedented in modern times.”
Bauer explains that the surveys conducted their own national sampling of mothers in late April by asking the same questions used by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) in previous food insecurity studies.
Significantly, Bauer also explains that the USDA aggregates a battery of questions on access to food from the Current Population Survey in 2018. If the nearly two-to-one ratio between the percent of mothers with children under the age of 12 who had food insecure children in their household and the percent of families with children who were not eating enough because they couldn’t afford enough food were maintained today, the “17.4 percent [of] children not eating enough would translate into more than a third of children experiencing food insecurity.”
The Hamilton Project (THP) is a Democratic Party economic policy think-tank associated with the Brookings Institution. Launched in 2006, the THP featured then-Senator Barack Obama as a speaker at its founding event, who called the organization “the sort of breath of fresh air that I think this town needs.”
The publication of the US hunger data is part of an initiative by THP to push for increases in government spending on national food programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps.
However, the Democratic Party proposal to increase food stamp benefits by 15 percent is being considered as a temporary measure “for the duration of the economic crisis,” according to the New York Times. In any case, the increase is still insufficient to provide the poor what they need to adequately feed their families, with the average monthly benefit of $239 going up by $36 to $274 under the Democrats’ proposal.
Meanwhile, with tens of millions who have lost their jobs during the pandemic unable to collect unemployment benefits due to delays and backlogs in government systems that are ill-equipped to handle the increase in applications, the same kind of bureaucratic mismanagement is certainly to be expected in the present wave of SNAP assistance applications.
Along with every social program over the past four decades, federal food stamp assistance has been attacked by Democratic and Republican administrations alike as “welfare” that is undeserved by those receiving it. Before the pandemic, President Trump boasted that he forced 7 million people off of food stamps since taking office and the Congressional Republicans were working on a plan to further reduce eligibility and expand work requirements to qualify for the benefit.
The return of mass hunger in America is an inevitable product of the response of the US government and ruling establishment to the pandemic, which has been a mixture of utter indifference to the suffering caused by the health crisis and outright cruelty toward the working class, poor and elderly who have been attacked by COVID-19 infection and death as well as the deprivation associated with the economic crisis.
Clearly, the staggering magnitude of the impact of the pandemic on families has been revealed by the findings of The Hamilton Project food insecurity study. As dire circumstances confronting millions of people persist and deepen, the crisis is pointing directly to social convulsions that have not been seen in the US since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
SHOULD JOBS GO TO ILLEGALS FIRST?
THAT IS THE GLOBALIST DEMOCRAT PARTY’S DOCTRINE!
Unemployment skyrockets among youth
More than 7.7 million workers younger than 30 are now unemployed in the US. Over 3 million dropped out of the labor force over the course of a single month, from mid-April to mid-May. The number of young people now unemployed amounts to nearly one in three young workers, the highest rate since the country started tracking unemployment by age in 1948.
These figures are paralleled in countries hit by the coronavirus pandemic all around the world. In Australia, the youth unemployment rate has jumped to 13.8 percent. Youth unemployment rates in Australia were already more than double the overall unemployment rate of the country and were almost three times higher than for those 25 and older.
A report from the Resolution Foundation think tank recently found that youth unemployment in the UK could rise by 640,000 this year, bringing the total above 1 million. In Spain, half of all those who have lost jobs since the start of the outbreak have been adults under the age of 35. In Canada, the youth unemployment rate jumped to 27.2 percent in April, from 16.8 percent in March. Student unemployment was even higher.
Young workers are vastly over-represented in the sectors hardest hit by the lockdown and social distancing measures. These sectors include hospitality, food services, retail, arts and recreation. Nearly 40 percent of the young workers who are unemployed in the US worked in the devastated retail and food service sectors alone. The Millennial generation, those aged between 26 and 40, make up a majority of bartenders and half of restaurant workers.
According to a new report by Data for Progress, over half of people under the age of 45 say that the $1,200 cash payment from the US federal government covered just a week or two of expenses, compared with a third of older adults.
The US Labor Department continues to report that the majority of laid-off workers expect their joblessness to be temporary. However, there is growing concern among economists that many jobs will never come back.
Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford University, recently told the New York Times that the path to recovery “is going to take longer and look grimmer than we thought.” Bloom is the co-author of an analysis of the pandemic’s effects on the labor market titled “COVID-19 Is Also a Reallocation Shock.” In it, he and his co-thinkers estimate that 42 percent of recent layoffs will result in permanent job loss.
A large body of research, along with the fresh experience of the 2008 recession, shows that young people, especially those without a college degree, are particularly vulnerable during economic downturns and recessions.
An analysis by the McKinsey Global Institute estimates that up to 57 million US jobs are now vulnerable, including a growing number of white-collar positions. Furthermore, the report finds that 86 percent of jobs made vulnerable by the pandemic pay less than $40,000 a year. In other words, those workers who were already in precarious situations are not only getting hit the hardest, many will be forced out of their industry altogether.
For those workers in the Millennial generation (now aged 26 to 40) and older, this is the second major economic catastrophe in barely a decade. The researchers note in their report that “the generation that first entered the job market in the aftermath of the Great Recession is now going through its second ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ downturn.”
If the 2008 financial crash is any indication, we can expect that the current economic downturn will exact a devastating toll on all workers, the youth in particular.
In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash, youth unemployment soared to more than 60 percent in some European regions. In many countries, the youth unemployment rate never fully recovered to pre-recession levels. In the US, half of recent graduates were unable to find work during the recession years. Millennials’ official unemployment rate ranged as high as 20 or 30 percent.
The recession was used as an opportunity to make more fundamental changes to the economy that would leave young workers hounded by high rates of underemployment, low wages and stagnant earnings trajectories for the following decade.
Full-time salaried positions were slashed with the introduction of “gig” economy work. Nearly 95 percent of the jobs created during the Obama administration, from 2009 to 2017, were part-time, contract, on-call or temporary. This piecemeal work, cynically sold to the younger generation as “flexible” work, often excludes health care, retirement benefits, sick days and other benefits, and is highly unreliable.
It has already become commonplace for workers to hold down two or three part-time jobs in order to make ends meet and provide for their families.
To get a sense of the scale of the economic crisis pre-pandemic, one should consider that in 2019 some 61 percent of US workers were reporting that they did not have enough savings to cover a $1,000 emergency room visit or car repair. One in five Millennials reported not being able to afford routine health care expenses, and nearly half had nothing saved. This situation is being dramatically worsened by the impact of the pandemic.
In 2018, taking note of the devastating toll the recession had taken on a whole generation of young workers, the Wall Street Journal noted that Millennials were at risk of becoming “America’s Lost Generation.” Similar warnings have already begun to circulate in regard to the emerging generation, known as Gen Z.
However, as the Journal itself nervously pointed out at the time, the Millennial generation in the US was also the first generation to favor socialism over capitalism. The dire conditions facing young people, which are more and more understood to be the consequence of decaying social order, have created the objective basis for a vast radicalization of young people and workers across the globe. The two years prior to the onset of the pandemic were marked by the reemergence of the class struggle internationally, in which young workers played leading roles.
Generation Z is now coming of age under conditions that far outstrip those which the Millennials confronted in the aftermath of 2008. The events of the day will not pass by this new generation, or the older generations, for that matter, without leaving a profound and revolutionary political impact.
The younger generation is coming of age in a world of immense contradictions, with enormous developments in technology and science occurring simultaneously with the deaths of hundreds of thousands of workers internationally as a result of the criminal response of the ruling class to the pandemic. Trillions of dollars are being poured into the coffers of the global corporate elites while young people’s schools are defunded and their jobs destroyed.
Instability and uncertainty are among the defining features of everyday life. Under such conditions, there is no doubt that the popularity of socialism among young people will continue to grow at a rapid pace. Far from becoming the “Lost Generation” as predicted by the Wall Street Journal, the emerging generation of young workers carries within it an enormous revolutionary force.
HOW MANY MORE ILLEGALS BEFORE THE GLOBALIST DEMOCRAT PARTY HAS DESTROYED MIDDLE AMERICA ALL TOGETHER???
Study finds 90 percent of Americans would make 67 percent more without last four decades of increasing income inequality
HAVE YOU EVER WITNESSED A BANKSTER-OWNED DEMOCRAT POL DOING SOMETHING FOR MIDDLE AMERICA???
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